Wigan Athletic boss explains cautious Christian Saydee approach amid impactful return from injury

Wigan Athletic striker Christian Saydee is still building up his fitness following a calf injury lay-off, with boss Gary Caldwell explaining the thinking behind his gradual return.

The 24-year-old only returned to the first-team fold this month after suffering a calf injury in pre-season, which sidelined him for a lengthy period.

Saydee has yet to start a game since his comeback, but has shown his quality in four substitute appearances, scoring twice against Oxford United and Huddersfield Town. Unfortunately, his goals were in vain as Latics suffered 2-1 defeats in both.

The London-born forward got just over 22 minutes plus stoppage time in Tuesday’s 3-0 defeat at Leicester City, although by the time he entered the fray, Wigan were already 2-0 down.

There is likely to be a clamour amongst supporters for Saydee to start against Bromley this weekend at the Brick Community Stadium.

Speaking after Tuesday’s loss at Leicester, Caldwell said that Saydee is not yet ready to play a full 90 minutes and that his time on the pitch needs to be carefully managed as he builds his fitness back up, whether he starts or features from the bench.

When asked about managing Saydee’s minutes and why he has yet to start since his return, Caldwell said: ”Yeah, that’s been a difficulty at this moment as well with such difficult games, but also with the personnel we’ve had to pick and how we’ve had to protect certain players at certain times - he would definitely be one of them.

“I think if we started him, we might get a half out of him - we might be able to push 60 (minutes) - so we have to keep assessing that.”

Caldwell is without a number of frontline players at the moment through injury or suspension, while he welcomed back Akeel Higgins from the bench on Tuesday after the summer signing recently returned from a hamstring injury.

The Latics boss added: “Max Power, Fraser Murray, Charlie Gray, Ryan Trevitt, Luke Harris - there’ll be more - but a lot of quality players who we haven’t got at our disposal at the minute, and that’s something that in the coming weeks we have to improve in terms of the squad size and who we can pick from and the quality we can get on the pitch.

“But even like Dara (Costelloe) tonight, hasn’t really fully trained and has done incredible to kind of recover from Saturday and play - I don’t know what he played - maybe another hour again.

“Akeel is just coming back, so we need to get everyone up to speed quickly, but that’s tough when you’re playing Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday, because training is compromised a little bit and you have to recover to be ready for the next game, which is hard.

“All those names I just mentioned, quality players, real quality players that we need to get back quickly and competing for places.”

Caldwell reserved special praise for 20-year-old K’Marni Miller, who made his first league start against the Foxes.

“I thought K’Marni on his league debut was superb,” Caldwell added.

”That’s a real positive, a young player that I think showed his quality and showed that he is capable of playing at this level.

“It wasn’t something we looked to do because of the quality of Fraser and the wing-backs that we have, but I thought he did really well and can stake his claim for a place on Saturday now.”